


the nothings surrounded by us

by newtils (icedskies)



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, but the spoilers are extremely vague, possible spoilers for the series, sad boys in love, very brief mention of suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:10:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5038756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icedskies/pseuds/newtils
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt and Thomas in a different time, a different world, where they were almost happy.</p><p>---</p><p>When they kissed, it was flowers that sprouted inexorably through a blanket of snow in the midst of winter. When they kissed, it was the feeling of a thousand insistent flames engulfing something at once. When they kissed, it was with the irrefutable sureness of a love that would last throughout lifetimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the nothings surrounded by us

**Author's Note:**

> title from 17 by youth lagoon.  
> possible trigger warnings in the tags. also possible spoilers for the series, but only if you know where to look. you have been warned.

They met on a day where the sky was a dusty shade of grey, with clouds that lingered like paint brushed on a canvas. When the boy with hair like chocolate spoke, it was as if the whole world paused to hear him talk. The air around him seemed to still with a patient silence. His words drifted, carried by a light breeze in the autumn morning. He introduced himself with a settling warmth, the kind of finality that meant he would be permanently etched into Newt's life.

"I'm Thomas, by the way."

And without the knowledge that this decision would affect everything to come, he smiled at the chocolate-haired boy.

"Newt."

* * *

Thomas was at his most candid at impossibly late hours of the night, when the sky was colorless and time stood still. He would talk about his earliest memories, of a house in the country with peeling paint and creaking floorboards. He would speak of distant places and traveling, of his need to fill a void that he couldn't seem to fill no matter how far he was from home.

Newt would return the conversation with stories of loneliness, of a place so dark and endless that the only escape from it was an escape from everything. He told Thomas about the view from the top of the highest building in his hometown, the feeling of falling, the feeling of the relief. He told him about the feeling of waking up, of realizing escaping was only temporary, and he had a permanent reminder in the form of a limp.

* * *

His eyes were as rich as cognac, as intoxicating as it as well. His skin was dotted in constellations, an endless map of a past so far off it was impossible to grasp. He had veins that stretched like reaching branches, trapped under a thin veil of translucent skin.

Newt thought of love as an incomprehensible mystery, as vast as space, yet as unavoidable as death. But staring at the boy in front of him, so tangible and yet still so far away, he realized exactly what love was.

* * *

At night, Newt dreamed of high stone walls, of inhuman shrieks that pierced the air, of heat and endless sand, of pain and pleas which always ended with an echoing finality that could only come from the barrel of a gun. Every time he would awaken, it would be to worried brown eyes and hand on his shoulder. He would wipe off the chilled beads of sweat that gathered around his face, apologize to Thomas, and roll over to face the blank, unsympathetic wall until sleep came. As many times as Newt was sure the other boy would leave him for good, he was proved wrong by the care and concern that melted off Thomas in waves.

"Why do you stay?" he finally asked one day, with insecurity dripping from his words like gasoline, ready to be lit.

"Because I love you," Thomas answered, as if it were the most simple thing in the entire world, sureness cemented in his voice.

* * *

 When they kissed, it was flowers that sprouted inexorably through a blanket of snow in the midst of winter. When they kissed, it was the feeling of a thousand insistent flames engulfing something at once. When they kissed, it was with the irrefutable sureness of a love that would last throughout lifetimes.

"Tommy?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you too."

* * *

When Thomas started getting the nightmares, they were unrelenting and came at full force. He saw people who he couldn't place, yet who had an unsettling familiarity, meet their untimely deaths in ways more gruesome than his mind could ever conjure. His dreams ended nearly the same way as Newt's, in pleas and the bang of a gunshot, but with the indisputable feeling of his own hands wrapped around cold metal, one finger on a trigger.

He would wake up with insatiable horror clawing through his body, and the first thing he always did was pull Newt as close as physics would allow.

* * *

"Hey, Newt?" Thomas whispered, when the glow of the television was casting an artificial light across the darkened room. Newt lifted his head off Thomas' chest, his fingers tightening in the other boy's shirt imperceptibly. "Do you think we knew each other?" he continued quietly, his voice nearly carried off by the sounds of the busy city that resided behind their thin walls. 

"What do you mean?" Newt questioned curiously, dropping his head to place a chaste kiss on the chocolate-haired boy's lips.

"Like...before," came the hesitant reply. A few moments passed as Thomas tried to summarize his thoughts into a comprehensible sentence. "Before this life?" The quiet hum of the television filled the room before Newt spoke again.

"I think... that I have fallen in love with you in every life that I have lived, and every life I will live after this," he stated calmly. A gentle, fond laugh escaped from Thomas' lips.

"You're a sap." Newt grinned at him, capturing his lips in another kiss, this time deeper than the last.

* * *

Now, when Newt stared at the boy with the cognac eyes and skin of constellations, he could be sure that the love he felt was reciprocated. It made him feel more at ease with the world than he thought he could ever deserve.

But Thomas thought Newt deserved everything and then some, and so he made it his unending goal to make sure the boy never doubted the extent of Thomas' love for him ever again.

* * *

Thomas envisioned that when the world ended, it would be from a mysterious incurable disease, or an irreparable natural disaster. He had never imagined that when the world ended, the only color left would be an unyielding, apathetic crimson. He had never imagined that the world would end from a last breath of someone he loved, an exhale that could have knocked down skyscrapers and stopped time itself.

And all at once, everything with substance disappeared from within him, the only tangible thing was the cold boy in his arms. The boy whose hair radiated like beams from the sun, golden and illuminating. The boy who took Thomas' own heart with him in his departure from this world.

Thomas had a crushing, overwhelming hope. He hoped that he would be lucky enough to love Newt again in the next life, and all of the lives after that.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first fic i've ever submitted anywhere ! please be easy on me :-) it didn't turn out quite as i had hoped but it's 9am and i haven't slept for 24 hours and i'm tired and ready to be done with this. unbeta'd and quickly edited by myself. also quick note, i cried while writing this. oops.
> 
> follow me on tumblr @newtils


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